You may have thought about your sensory preferences and dislikes in a relatively lighthearted way, in terms of foods and amusements you enjoy or don't enjoy. Now start taking a closer look at how the lifestyle choices you make are affected by the way your senses work. How might your sensory strengths and weaknesses have impacted your choice of career, or your happiness in the jobs you've had? Have they made a difference in where you've chosen to live, what you've chosen to drive, or what sort of exercise you get?

Just as you may suspect sensory integration disorder in your child because he has behaviors that seem to have no logical explanation, your own sensory integration-related behavior may seem to be beyond normal common sense. If you regularly do things that turn out badly and you have no idea why you did them, start looking for possible sensory solutions to the mystery. You may believe you've made decisions for logical reasons, but often there's an undercurrent of sensory need or phobia at work as well.

That's not a bad thing. The way your particular senses work to form your outlook on the world is part of what makes you a unique individual and colors your personality. What can be bad, though, is a presumption that your reality is the same as everybody else's, and that therefore those who see things differently are wrong and you are right. Admitting that others — most significantly, your child — might have their own sensory sensitivities that make their differing reactions just as valid as your own is an important step to being a better and more understanding parent.

While you may comfortably admit that what you taste and smell is governed by sensory preferences, and even what you feel, or how you experience motion or movement, like most people you probably think that seeing is believing. Surely, if there's anything you can trust, it's what your own eyes tell you. But even there, your brain is busy making interpretations that aren't entirely governed by any “real,” physical, unequivocal truth. What you see can be influenced by the accuracy with which your brain interprets visual information, how it handles large amounts of new information, and how it integrates the information with feedback from other senses.

You've probably had the experience of looking at a familiar place and noticing something you've never seen before or of not finding something that's right in front of your nose. You may think of this as absentmindedness, but in fact your brain often makes determinations of which things in your field of vision are important enough to be interpreted. Sometimes, things that may in fact be seen with your eyes don't make it to your conscious thought. When you say, in amazement, “I never saw it there!” you're quite right.

At the same time, your brain fills in the gaps for the things you don't see — objects that fall into your blind spot — using memory and generalizations and information from other senses. In most cases, these little visual magic tricks that your brain pulls off are believable enough that you don't even notice any discrepancy. But that doesn't mean what you see is entirely accurate, or that others might not see something different and feel just as sure of their sight.